You drive your gorgeous rental Tesla out along the exit from Gardermoen airport, clear signs directing you towards Oslo or other exciting points in the Østfold. A sign looms up* with a friendly message in English:

Goodbye and Welcome Back!

You do a double-take – have you found yourself on a road heading back into the airport? How did they know you’d get lost so quickly? And are they always this friendly?

Closer inspection of the Norwegian sign above it reveals:

Ha en Fin Dag. Velkommen tilbake!

Directly translated – Have a good day and welcome back.

Velkommen tilbake: this is a charming expression – a wish that after a wonderful experience here you will choose to come back sometime, and that when you do come back you will receive a warm welcome. From whoever put up that sign.

But, my Norwegian readers, in this situation it does not translate as Welcome Back. That’s what you say when you actually arrive again, not when you’re leaving!

I’ll suggest some alternatives for this kind of scenario (leaving a place, finishing a website transaction, saying goodnight to the very last customer in the bar):

Come back soon! Come again!

Have a good trip!

Hope to see you again!

Thanks for coming/shopping/just being here!

Or just the Goodbye is enough on its own

And here is a more correct use, where you will indeed be welcomed back in the spring to this tower on the Oslo waterfront for an amazing view.

(Actually, it would sound better as “See you in the Spring”. Springtime sounds a bit Cole Porter-ish.)

Velkommen tilbake = See you again sometime, we really did enjoy having you even if we didn’t communicate it so well at the time.

* Disclaimer – it’s been a while since I’ve driven from the airport, and wouldn’t usually stop to photograph signs, so this particular sign might not be there, or worded differently. It’s an illustration of a scenario. And come to think of it, can you actually rent a Tesla?

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and from Italian to English. Read more.

It’s always fun to find ways to find equivalent words for some Norwegian terms. In our house we leave many words as they are, to keep things easy – barnehage, skattekort, trikk, matpakke, brødskiver and other terms that relate to the mechanics of Scandinavian daily life revolving around work and children.

In the blog post linked to below, the author has done a great job tackling 10 Norwegian terms. (Yes there are way more comments than content but it’s worth a read!)

My 2 kroner:

Kose – as verb, adverb, adjective – is a wonderful term and best kept in the original. It conveys so much of Norwegian warmth and good intent.

Takk for sist is also one of my favourites, once I figured it out. That was about the same time as Takk for meg/Takk for nå/Takk for idag/Takk for oss.

Døgn. How clever to have a word that means 24 hours, but you don’t have to say 24 hours!

Dugnad – I’ll come back to that one. The easiest thing is to just live here for a while and experience it for yourself.

Språkvask – the inspiration for this site! A lovely way to describe the cleaning or nitpicking of some text, to make communication clearer.